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Section 3: Tell a Story

My original idea was to create a music video for the ‘Tell a Story’ project, using the song ‘Oh Brother’ by ‘SOAK.’

Lyrics:

Full grown now,
Arching over me with your back bent out,
Sorry I missed the tide,
That pulled you under

Brother tell me,
Do you know where you’re going?,
Recall where you’ve been,
Because I’ve been worrying,
That the thrills aren’t all you seek

Where is your warmth?,
Where is your heart?,
What is love if we’ve been torn apart,

Oh brother,
Can you stay with me?,
Where my fears aren’t real,
Pretend we are who we used to be,
Because we forgot how to dream.

(All rights to the song owned by SOAK and Rough Trade Records, Nova Records and Lifestyler Music).

The song is about the singer’s brother who is struggling with drug addiction and how she doesn’t want him to be pulled back into his addiction. She is trying to keep him safe but doesn’t know how to, because she doesn’t know where he goes or what he does. The speaker wants to save him but knows that realistically, he doesn’t want to be saved.

My music video:

The basic idea for the music video:

It is about a girl’s brother who is struggling with drug addiction and she is trying to get him away from it (similar to the singer’s story). In the video, the girl will be running through coastal landscapes, trying to reach her brother who will have gone to the beach. He is moving towards the sea, which represents his addiction, and is slowly being pulled into the water. Towards the end of the video, the sister will get to the beach and see her brother, but she is too late. He is curled up on the sand, soaking wet with shallow water surrounding him. She runs over to him and hunches over him, crying/screaming.

I want to film at a coastal area for the most part of the video and the weather conditions should be windy and grey.

Planning sheets:

Mood board:

From this original idea, I decided that I wanted to take the concept of drug addiction and film something with a metaphorical approach similar to my first idea but a different notion and not filmed in a music video format.

My basic idea:

There will be one character who is struggling with drug addiction and throughout the video will “overcome” it, in a sense. To represent this, I will have the actor in the city, very early in the morning before the sun rises. The film will start by “following” the character around the city streets while it is still dark. Throughout the video, the character will get higher up through the city as the sky gets lighter, getting to their highest point towards the end of the film. The last shots will be of them “above” the skyline (most likely at the top of Princesshay car park in Exeter), watching the sun rise completely. The whole film is a metaphor for the overcoming of drug addiction and the sunrise is what represents the end of the struggle and the start of a new beginning; The sunrise embodies the concept of hope.

To make the film feel more personal, I want to include quite a few CU shots and shots of the actor looking directly at the camera. I think this will help the audience to connect to the story more because you feel you know the character more. As well as this, none of the filming will be done with the camera on a tripod because I believe the slight movement of the camera that comes with it being held helps to eliminate an almost robotic nature and again, will make the audience feel closer to the character’s story.

It is important that the character appears to be tired and that she is dressed very casually, in ripped jeans, a hoodie and worn in shoes. This will help emulate the idea that she is holding onto her last thread of hope.

DETAILED TARGET AUDIENCE PROFILE:

My target audience is teenagers to very early twenties. There isn’t a definite influential aim that I am trying to achieve by creating this film because I don’t think it will ‘hit home’ that hard as is it is presenting the concept of drug addiction in a more metaphorical sense. However, hopefully, the audience will take something constructive from the underlying message. The members of my target audience are likely to know about/be familiar with drugs but are unlikely to have as much knowledge or experience with drug addiction. My film will hopefully give an insight into the ‘dark side’ of drugs and drug addiction; This will be shown by the main character coming from darkness to light, showing that the cold empty streets aren’t where you want to be.

My target audience is likely to include both male and female, earning as low as a minimum wage or not earning at all (most of the money they might earn being disposable), still in education, living a typical student lifestyle.

I went ahead with filming without making a script or storyboard. I don’t think that a significantly bad effect on my final product because I wasn’t working with anyone else and I knew what I wanted my film to look like and what shots I wanted to have in it. However, I do think that a storyboard and script would have helped to make the process of filming more efficient. As well as this, if I was working with a team, I would have to have a storyboard and script because all members of the production would need to know what they needed to do for every shot.